That Old Black Magic
by Jessa L'Rynn
Summary: Dean, Sam, and the Angel try to take a vacation to Savannah, Georgia. Key word, as always with them, being "try".


_**Chapter 1: As Your Attorney, I Advise You to Order Golf Shoes**_

"What's in the box?" Dean asked.

Sam made a face, wondering why it was that his brother couldn't take anything less than Armageddon itself seriously. "Dean, that..." He couldn't even finish the sentence, couldn't even try. It was pretty damned obvious what was in the box, since there was a decapitated body lying next to it. "It's golf shoes," Sam snarked, considering the body's completely appropriate costume.

Castiel peered up from the gaudily covered feet of the deceased. "Why would there be golf shoes in the box?" he questioned. "Surely these, though lurid, were sufficient to this man's needs?"

Dean smiled slightly, ignoring the angel's usual obliviousness (as usual). "So, I'm assuming it's not his golf balls in there," Dean joked, then sighed, looking to the heavens as though they had personally offended him. (Technically they had, but Dean usually let it slide more or less.) "One weekend off, is that too much to ask?"

"Probably," Castiel answered, presumably on his absent Father's behalf, "the odds are not in your favor. Nevertheless, we do not have any known connection to this body. Neither are we required to dispose of it. We can go back to hitting things with sticks..."

"Two things," Dean said. "One, your ball is in this guy's left ear," (it had fallen in through the opening of the box), "and two..."

"Decapitation is usually us," Sam interrupted. "Vampire?"

"Too much sunlight," Dean pointed out the obvious. It wasn't that vampires couldn't go out in daylight, it was that it hurt like a bitch, and the brighter the day, the worse it was. Dean knew - he'd been one once.

"No self-respecting vampire would be caught dead in Ralph Lauren," Sam offered, poking at the red polo shirt and then the mismatched plaid trousers with his toe.

"Are there self-respecting vampires, anymore?" Dean wondered. "Stephanie Meyers is still walking around, you know." He shrugged, then grimly added, "Bitch is probably the Alpha's propaganda chick."

"I'll just call it in," Sam decided. "We are not meant for normal sports."

"You're the one who had a 'Groupon'," Dean complained, and he seemed to have acquired the ability to speak in air quotes from Cas. "I didn't even want to play golf."

"I was trying to figure out what your fascination with it was."

"My fascination?" Dean asked, and then he apparently remembered that Sam had found golf clubs at Lisa's house before Dean had moved out. "Dude, that was before Purgatory, and what was I supposed to do in the suburbs? You can't exactly get the guys together for machete practice before the back yard barbeque."

"People will talk," Castiel supplied, dry and helpful. Dean grinned like the angel had said the funniest thing. Sam had no idea whether Cas was joking or not.

Sam shook his head at the pair of them and slung his clubs over his shoulder as he reached for his phone. He was dialing while Dean and Cas continued going over the scene, the angel's attention and the hunter's picking up different, but hopefully useful, details. He introduced himself as Special Agent Sam Nash, here in Savannah on vacation, and explained what he'd found.

"Dude," Dean wondered as soon as Sam hung up, "what's the stroke penalty for moving your ball before it goes to the morgue?"

Sam rolled his eyes and felt a little like he'd been caught in an episode of CSI.

* * *

"I see dead people," the coroner complained.

Sam just shook his head. He often thought Dean was the only person he knew who spoke fluent pop culture references, but it was definitely becoming the thing to do today. A quick hand gesture to let Dean know where he was going, and Sam went to join the sheriff's deputy out from under the trees.

Castiel was actually writing down what the man said. Sam was pretty sure he'd never be able to read what the angel was scribbling in a notebook he'd produced from somewhere, but he hoped this way it would be easy to translate. "Dean's with the coroner," Sam explained as both the uniformed officer and the trench-coated angel looked up at his arrival. "Special Agent Sam Nash," he introduced himself, "we spoke on the phone."

"Rick Rogers. I was just telling you partner here..."

"We're not partners," Cas corrected.

Sam forced himself not to sigh, and shot Cas a quelling look, hoping he'd learned the silent 'shut up' at least from all his time with Dean. "We work in different offices," he lied. Then, just to make sure - he hoped - that Cas would catch on, he added, "Agent Stills here is Dean's partner, and Dean's my brother."

"Didn't plan on a working vacation, I bet," said Rogers, pulling off his hat to run a handkerchief over his balding pate.

"No, sir," Sam agreed. "Came for the parade, and I guess we'll be staying for the investigation."

A few moments, and a few urges to strangle Cas passed, while Sam handed the cop his supervisor's card - Kevin had gotten used to pretending to be FBI on the phone - and waited. "Your boss sounds like a ten year old," Rogers said as he hung up.

"He is not," Cas said. "He is a..."

"You know how it is," Sam interrupted urgently - the last thing they needed right now was the phrase 'Prophet of the Lord' in this conversation. "You work your ass off for years, and they hire the college kid off the street to tell you what to do."

Rogers grinned, and Sam grinned, and they were comrades after that. He decided the safest thing for their new camaraderie was less angels. "Cas, why don't you let Dean know what we've found out?"

The angel nodded, and toddled off, and Sam felt better already.

* * *

"You wanna look?" the coroner asked Cas, pulling out a drawer in the wall of them, while across the morgue, the body from the golf course got situated.

"I don't want any part of it," Cas replied warily, and Dean chuckled in the background. Sam went on with the actual work in this situation, ID'ing the body, finding out the next of kin, if there was any known explanation for the guy and his head to have parted company so abruptly. Dean and Cas could keep playing around all they wanted, but someone had to actually get some work done around here.

He lost track of time in the process of finding out that the dead guy was Joel "Smilie" Sanders, a local car dealing politician. It was at least long enough that he found out poor "Mr. Smilie" was beloved in his community, and that his head weighed 5.2 kilograms.

What interrupted Sam's fascination with the professional autopsy - he'd done more than his share of field autopsies, sadly, but he liked to watch the real work, sometimes, just to compare - was Rogers coming back with an expression of grim satisfaction. "Got a suspect," he said, showing Sam a file.

There was a picture of a large, burly, machete wielding landscaper, and he apparently worked at the golf course in question. For some reason, according to the file, the guy, Warren Harris, was convinced that Smilie Sanders, that pillar of the community, was responsible for the death of his young daughter. He'd tried to get the guy arrested, and was currently in the process of filing a wrongful death lawsuit. He looked good for it - real good. Maybe he'd been in the process of disposing of the body when Cas had sliced his ball into that wood.

Sam shook his head. He was with Dean on this - monsters made sense. People, not so much. He thanked Rogers and suggested the cop call if he needed anything. Then he went to tell the guys they were scott free to return to their vacation. He wasn't sure whether he was rescuing them from the coroner or the coroner from them.

"Awesome," said Dean, glancing at his cell phone. "Looks like we'll have time to catch dinner."

* * *

"The Pirates' House," Dean pronounced. They were in the parking lot of an old tavern turned restaurant, above Savannah's famous River Walk, less than a mile from the Savannah River itself. "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must use caution."

"Really, Dean?" Sam demanded. "Really? Cas, we're just eating, not time traveling. He's losing it. Ignore him."

"I don't understand," Castiel admitted, but why would he? Dean was nuts.

"He's quoting, Cas," Sam said, grimly.

"This place used to be a pirates' tavern," Dean explained as they walked across the lot. "There are supposed to be secret passages where they'd shanghai the unlucky saps who got drunk here by mistake and haul them out to the ships on the river. Poor bastards would pass out in the bar and wake up in the middle of the Atlantic with some sonuvabitch screaming at them in Italian."

Cas tilted his head to the side. "Did it have to be Italian?" he wondered. "Could they not have been screamed at in English, or Portuguese?"

"Whatever language, pick one," Dean said, and otherwise was completely patient, which Sam had never understood. "The point was ending up press-ganged before Orlando Bloom made it cool."

They got through a good meal at a rather classy restaurant without Dean embarrassing them or Cas scaring the wait staff more than a little. Sam had a salad - a good one, all locally sourced and grown, - the kind he couldn't get in BigGerson's. Cas ordered the soup of the day - it seemed that tasting molecules didn't apply as much with soup. Dean, in response to a total lack of burgers on the menu, ordered a steak, lightly killed, and ate it while it screamed. (Not really, but did it have to be _that_ rare? Sam had been living with the man all his life, but sometimes he was convinced his brother was part wolverine.)

Dessert was easier. Sam wanted to say no, but you couldn't do that when there was Dean and pie in the same building, and he ordered the peach, so Sam decided to be a heathen and order the cheese cake. They couldn't resist buying Cas the angel food cake - well, they could've, but they didn't try too hard.

While they waited, Cas pulled a pile of brochures from a pocket of the trench coat he was still carrying but not wearing. He'd been admiring all of them this morning in the motel lobby while Dean and Sam got third rate coffee and second rate danishes. Motel 6 was really coming up in the world.

"Since we do not have to deal with Mr. Smilie," Cas said, "I think we should probably investigate this."

He handed Dean one of the fliers, dark and bleak with a huge, blood-lettered banner on the front, proclaiming it a sales brochure for a ghost tour. Sam groaned. "Cas," he started, "this is just..."

"I think he's right," Dean decided, something wicked and gleeful twinkling in his eye. Sam groaned again and contemplated braining himself on the table top. "C'mon, Sammy, it'll be fun," his brother promised.

Their dessert arrived then, with a waitress who looked more like one of those ageless Hollywood beauties than an actual human being. She astounded Sam by slipping him her number on a small cocktail napkin. He blinked at it, then looked at the woman with the dark, brilliant eyes, and folded the napkin to put in his pocket. His brother shot him an encouraging grin, a silent dare in that ridiculous expression of his, while the angel of the missing Lord just looked politely and absent-mindedly baffled. Before he could say something and confuse everyone, Sam changed the subject. "How's the angel food cake, Castiel?"

The angel blinked at the dessert in question, fresh glazed strawberries dripping down the sides of the slice, chocolate sauce drizzled artistically all over the plate. Whole, capped fruits and a generous dollop of whipped cream provided the finishing touch. "Angels do not require food," he reminded them. "Therefore, the name is suspect."

Dean leaned over and stole a strawberry, scooping up whipped cream and chocolate at the same time. He expected his brother to pop the whole thing rudely into that gaping maw of his, but Dean leaned over the angel, with a firm, "Try this." Castiel, looking a little baffled and a lot something Sam didn't want to actually think about, took the offering between humorously parted lips.

Sam tried not to roll his eyes or make a face at them, so he looked down at his cheesecake, and took a quick bite. "Oh my God," he groaned, astonished as the tantalizing flavors of vanilla and cream burst across his palate. It wasn't a cheesecake, it was a religious experience.

"You're such a girl," Dean pronounced, a soft smile on his face, and a forkful of cake in his hand.

Sam made a face at him. He couldn't actually help that, because he wasn't the one feeding an adult man in public while his own desert lay melting and neglected. He had just decided to go ahead and point it out when Cas took Dean's hand and guided the fork to his mouth.

Sam took a bite of Dean's pie and ice cream. It wasn't half bad. Cas made a noise like a dropped mouse, an astonished little squeak. "How is it?" Sam asked, amused at the angel's wide blue eyes, and considering going back for another bite off Dean's plate.

"My pie!" Dean complained and finally paid attention to his own dessert, snatching it out of Sam's reach.

"This makes me happy," Cas decided, and forked up another bite of the cake.

Dean smiled at him, and Cas smiled right back. They were so freaking gay.

* * *

The night had fallen, mild and fragrant with magnolia blossom, as the trio settled in for the ghost tour. They had sort of commandeered the back of an open air trolley, in the company of a gaggle of whispering tourists and one teenaged brat who appeared to have been dragged along by the lady in the lime green sports coat in the front of the bus.

Dean was trying to explain to Cas that the Savannah ghosts weren't real - not the way they understood real ghosts - but wasn't getting anywhere, because the more he talked, the louder the kid turned up the damn stereo system. Sam made a face at him. Seriously, this wasn't the friggin' 80s, so what the hell? The hunter stood up - to as much of his full height as he could manage in this overhyped mini-bus - and moved to sit next to the kid, in the name of intimidation. Besides, it would give him the room to stretch his legs down the aisle.

The kid didn't flinch. Castiel frowned at him, and even Dean glared. "I'm sorry, Dean," Cas said, in a rather impressively loud voice, "did you say 'Irving Hedges'?"

"No." Dean's voice, despite its commanding bravado, didn't carry nearly so well. Difference in their regular battlefields, perhaps? Sam was mildly curious. "I said..." Dean swore colorfully and then rounded on the rock fan. "Look, kid, I like rock music as much as the next guy, but you gotta keep your tunes to yourself."

"You never keep your music to yourself," Castiel pointed out. "Sam and I are repeatedly subjected to the same seven albums on an endless loop, with the assurance that the driver picks the music. When either of us drives, you still insist on your music selection on the grounds that the ownership of the car supersedes the need for shotgun to 'shut his cakehole'."

Dean gaped at the angel. Sam put a hand up over his mouth, because if he didn't he was sure he was going to giggle like a school girl. He had never - not ever - heard anyone put his brother in his place like that before.

"Not the point," Dean finally managed. "My car, my rules. And it's six."

"Six?" Castiel questioned.

"Six albums."

"I count seven, if you include the tape in the..."

"No," Dean said, and when Cas opened his mouth, Dean held up a finger and stopped him. "Not one more word." Now Sam was going to have to find this mysterious seventh tape. Dean turned to the teenager. "Excuse me."

The kid, who seemed to have it down to a science, ignored him. Dean trying to be polite was impressive in Sam's book, and he watched avidly to see what happened next.

"Excuse me, would you might stopping that noise?" Dean asked.

The kid apparently knew they couldn't pummel an underage douche, or something, because he turned the irritating little sound system up instead of down. Dean narrowed his eyes and, Sam noticed, fingered his gun. Where's a demon when you need one, Sam thought desperately.

"Excuse me, would you mind stopping that damned noise?!"

And the little bitch had the actual nerve to look Dean Winchester in his aggravated, demon-killing, angel-smiting, monster-fighting face, and flip him off. Sam knew hunters who wouldn't have had balls that big. He knew gods that wouldn't. He winced.

Cas stood up and, in a smooth, sharp gesture, poked the kid in the forehead with two fingers. As the boy sank bonelessly down in his seat, snoring loudly before he even settled, Cas found and pulled the plug on the little speakers, leaving the iPod to drain its batteries to itself in silence.

"What were you saying?" Cas asked Dean, but he did it around a round of applause from the rest of the bus.

Sam gaped at the pair of them. "Did that just happen?" he asked.

"What?" Dean wondered.

"Did you two seriously just do the scene from _Star Trek IV_?"

"Are you all right, Sammy?" Dean asked, and he reached over with one hand as if to feel Sam's forehead. Sam swatted at his brother's hand for a moment, a kid trying to avoid a motherly gesture in public.

It took him a moment to get over Dean's sudden evil little grin. While he tried to get un-grossed-out, the trolley passengers went right back to what they were doing as if nothing had happened at all. Sam got up and moved to the seat across the aisle from Dean this time.

"Did you guys have to do that, though, really?" Sam asked, staring at his brother and the angel as they leaned together to try and talk more quietly now.

"Do what, Sammy?" Dean demanded, thoroughly annoyed.

"Kirk and Spock," Sam insisted frantically. "That was just..."

"Which one are you?" Dean asked, smiling with as much innocence as he could possibly manage which, since Sam knew better, was actually an impossible number less than zero.

A white haired man who was probably in his late sixties came on board then and started to check in, cheerfully, with his passengers. He came to the back to check their tickets. "What's wrong with him?" the guy asked, gesturing at the teen.

"Dunno," Dean and Cas shrugged, and even Sam couldn't tell if they were acting, so he was sure no one else would be able to do.

"Just let him sleep," said the woman he'd come on with. "Honestly, I'm just glad he's quiet for once."

Dean shrugged again, and the old man shrugged back and made his way back to the front of the trolley without anyone explaining that the funny angel and the guy in too much plaid had shut the kid down. It was then that Sam Winchester finally realized that, despite actual suspects for decapitated golfers, there was still something supernatural going on in Savannah, Georgia, and that he might very well be the only one who could see it.


End file.
